Biohazard and Pathogen Disinfection in Sparkman, AR

Sparkman is a small second-class city on Arkansas Highway 7 in western Dallas County, about twenty-six miles west-northwest of the county seat of Fordyce.

Lemil "Pete" Sparkman founded the settlement in 1892, establishing a lumber mill near the Ultima Thule, Arkadelphia and Mississippi Railway, a seventeen-mile trunk line, and he became the first postmaster when a post office opened on September 19, 1893.

By 1899, Sparkman was home to about 150 citizens and had three blacksmiths, a cotton gin, two general stores, a sawmill, a church, and a depot.

Present-day Sparkman sits about a quarter-mile southwest of the original settlement, which residents still call Old Sparkman; the town moved after the profitable timber was cut out and the Malvern and Camden Railroad put down tracks around 1913, with a new town platted on August 1, 1913.

Sparkman officially incorporated on January 15, 1915, becoming the fifth incorporated city in Dallas County, and that same year it gained the Hotel Sparkman, an electric power plant, and its first newspaper, the Sparkman News.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Sparkman boasted a regionally known girls' championship basketball team known as the Sparkman Sparklers.

Sparkman's population peaked at 964 in the 1950 census; the 2020 census counted 355 residents, down from 427 in 2010, and in 2000 the city had 586 people living in 237 households.

Once a thriving lumber town, Sparkman is today chiefly a farming community, and a slumping home-building industry has harmed the area's vital timber industry and pushed many residents to move away for work.

Sparkman's most famous residents were the Browns, the vocal trio behind several pop and country hits of the 1950s and 1960s — Jim Ed Brown and Bonnie Brown were born in Sparkman, and Jim Ed Brown went on to a successful solo career.

Samuel Woodrow Williams, a minister and professor born in Sparkman in 1912, played a vital role in the civil rights movement in Atlanta, Georgia, and mentored many students who became important leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr.